Rafael swung my hand in his, which was something he did when he thought I was thinking too hard about something besides being with him. I knew that he would say something now, because that was what the hand swing meant.
“Do you have a preference on which of the empty guest rooms we use?” he asked.
In my head I thought, A room I’ve never been in with anyone else, but that seemed less than diplomatic, so I said, “Two of them have showers now. I think one of those.”
“I thought you wanted us in a bed tonight,” he said, smiling down at me.
I smiled back and said, “I do, but now we can clean up afterward without having to kick anyone out of the main showers.”
He raised my hand and brushed it lightly with his lips as we walked; he did it smoothly with no broken motion. “You are always so concerned that others are not inconvenienced. You will be a queen soon, Anita, you must embrace it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think the official title is going to change me all that much.”
“If you were my queen, I would want to dress you as befits my lady and shower you with gifts.”
I laughed then. “Jean-Claude is lucky he’s getting me into the bespoke designer wedding gown. He knows not to push his luck on dressing me fancy every day.”
“You think the wedding will change nothing?” he asked.
“It better not,” I said, and there was an edge of threat in my voice that I didn’t try to hide.
“I wish you better luck than I have had with such things.”
I looked up at him then, studying his face. I don’t know what I would have said next, because I felt the energy coming down the hallway toward us. Happy, wonderful energy of two of the loves of my life.
Micah and Nathaniel came walking up the hallway, hand in hand, and suddenly it was like the sun had risen in my chest so that it was hard to breathe. My reaction felt over the top, ridiculous. I’d never been one of those people who let myself get carried away, until Jean-Claude and these two walked into my life and stayed. Micah was my height, the only man I’d ever dated who was as short as me. Nathaniel was taller at five foot nine. He’d grown three inches taller and suitably broader through the shoulders since I met him. His auburn hair had also been down to his ankles; now it fell just past his shoulders, shining and perfectly straight. Micah’s hair was the same length, but his dark brown hair was so curly that it was inches longer when it was wet. I didn’t usually think of Micah as the more delicate of the two men, maybe because I was usually beside them and didn’t see them together from a distance that often.
Micah was built like a swimmer with that upside-down V of shoulders down to narrow waist and hips. He could spend as much time as Nathaniel did in the weight room, but he didn’t muscle up like our shared man did. They were both strong, but in T-shirt, jeans, and boots Micah could hide it, Nathaniel couldn’t. Nathaniel was the male equivalent of an old-fashioned pinup, lush and masculine, but with a face that was closer to beautiful; before he’d filled out with more muscle and extra growth, he’d been beautifully androgynous, and now he was still beautiful, but even from the back with the long hair he was finally and completely male. Micah on the other hand still treaded that androgynous line, and he sort of hated it. We were both over thirty, so there wasn’t going to be a growth spurt for him or me.
Rafael squeezed my hand, which made me look at him. I had a second of wondering if I’d dropped a polyamorous ball by ogling my men this way, but he smiled. “Go to them. It does my heart good to see all of you so happy together, gives me hope that I’ll find my own crazy happy someday.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I left him with Benito and Claudia and almost ran toward them. We’d been together five years now, and I still wanted to be as close as possible to them every time I saw them. I didn’t run to them, but I might have power-walked, and I was in their arms, because it was their arms. We’d been a threesome from the beginning, never just a couple. We put our faces together before we kissed, forehead to forehead for Micah and me, and Nathaniel bending over us so that we touched, our arms interlocked in a circle of just us. Then Micah kissed my cheek, which made me move so that he could kiss me on the mouth. It was a good kiss, soft and complete but still okay for public consumption. We could have kissed like that standing on the sidewalk and not offended anyone. I drew back from the kiss to stare into his chartreuse eyes, green and gold at the same time the way a cat’s could be, because they were the eyes of his leopard trapped forever in his human face. Too long in animal form and sometimes you don’t come back all the way. It was why he needed glasses, because leopards don’t see distance that well; if it’s too far to hunt or attack, then it’s far more important to see up-close movement. The sunglasses he still wore to hide his eyes in public were prescription, and I’d never known. It had explained why he’d worn them inside so often.
I looked at him almost eye to eye, though my boots were more combat/police, so his club boots gave him a couple of extra inches of height. He didn’t wear them to be taller, he wore them because Nathaniel had picked them out for him. Left to his own devices Micah was running shoes and nice dress shoes. We both had things in our closets that our third had bought for us.
Nathaniel used our joined hands to turn me toward him as if there was music in his head I couldn’t hear, and it was the beginning of a dance. Micah let go of both of us and stepped back to give him room to do what he was going to do, because just that one dancelike move said he had something planned that was less tame than Micah’s kiss.
From a distance Nathaniel’s eyes looked deep violet blue, but up close you realized they were just violet. He had to put blue on his driver’s license because purple wasn’t a choice. His normal color was a paler lavender; the eye color alone let me know his mood was up. He put one hand at the small of my back and the other in my hand and he literally started to waltz. I had a moment of awkwardness that I almost always did when I danced, but I stopped trying to shield so hard at the connection between us and suddenly I could dance, because Nathaniel could dance.
We danced in the hallway with him smiling down at me, his eyes shining with happiness, and along with the dancing skills came his mood. I laughed out loud from the joy that was bubbling through him. I wondered exactly what had made him this happy. He used his hand at the small of my back to press us closer together, so I could feel that there were other things up besides just his mood. The feel of him pressed so hard against the front of me made me miss a step; I got a string of visuals from the afternoon he and Micah had shared that made my knees so weak I would have fallen if he hadn’t caught me. I loved being in the middle of the two of them for sex, but as their own wedding approached, our mostly heterosexual Micah was trying to work on issues he was having with two men and no girl in sight.
I managed to say in a voice gone hoarse with just the memory feedback, “Sorry I missed it.”
“Next time,” Nathaniel said, and then he picked me up off the floor and spun me around, laughing.
“This is not just the shorthand of a couple, you shared what you are feeling and thinking,” Rafael said.
Nathaniel set me down, but kept his arms around me, and I kept hold of him. My knees weren’t weak anymore, but we hadn’t kissed yet. He’d wanted to share his delight, but he wasn’t done.
“Yes,” Nathaniel answered him, but kept looking at me. He leaned in to kiss me and I went up on tiptoe to help.
My eyes were closed, but I still knew that Micah had crossed behind me toward the wererats. He wasn’t bound to me like Nathaniel was, but he was still my Nimir-raj and that was its own magic. Then Nathaniel was kissing me, and I forgot about everything else.
It was like a continuous feedback loop of his mouth on mine, mine on his, his hands so strong on my back, and my smaller hands on the smooth muscles of his back, his hands having to find their way around the shoulder holster with the Springfield EMP nine-millimeter and the big knife in a sheath along my spine, the extra ammo on th
e right side of my gun belt, the inner pants holster of the Sig Sauer .380. Nathaniel even got the thought in there that I still felt like I was cheating on my old Browning BDM by carrying the Springfield nine-millimeter for every day, and the Springfield .45 when I was on duty as a marshal. I got that he missed my body under his hands without all the straps and weapons. There was a moment when I wasn’t sure whose thought, hands, mouth, body was whose. I was trying to climb back into control or something when I felt Damian wake for the night. Suddenly it was three of us and I felt that first gasp as he woke like a swimmer who had almost drowned and was fighting back to life.
Then we were looking down at him; the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen in a human being stared up at us, set in the milk-white skin of a natural redhead who had spent a thousand years in the dark. It meant his hair had no gold highlights like most redheads, so it looked darker, a true red instead of the orangey color it might have been.
Rafael said, “What is that?”
Micah said, “Damian’s awake,” as Nathaniel and I broke from the kiss and looked at each other. Nathaniel’s eyes were green, and because I could still see/feel through him, I knew mine were, too. I had a moment to be truly creeped out by it, and Damian shut down the link and we were left alone in our bodies in the hallway, knowing that the vampire third of our triumvirate of power had his feelings hurt that it had bothered me to see his power in our eyes.
7
“IS THAT WHAT it would be like if Anita made me her rat to call?” Rafael asked.
“No, it’s a more complete bonding because we have Damian hooked up to us. Only the triumvirate with Jean-Claude, Richard, and I can come close to this level of . . . intermingling. It’s not like this with any of the other animals to call unless we work at it.”
“At least if Anita’s power shows, we both have brown eyes, so it will not be so obvious,” Rafael said.
“Did we miss something?” Micah asked.
Nathaniel studied my face. “I didn’t see the decision in your mind.”
“You got distracted,” I said.
He grinned. “You always distract me.” He reached for me again, and Micah stepped in the way.
“I love you both, but this is serious. If Anita is going to make Rafael her rat to call, I need to know and so do Jean-Claude and Asher.”
Nathaniel wasn’t smiling as he shook his head. “She hasn’t decided yet.”
“And you know that how?” Benito asked.
“It wasn’t in her head just now.” He said it as if it was a perfectly reasonable answer.
“Do you know everything she’s thinking?” Rafael asked.
“No, but a decision that big would have been in the front of her thoughts, and it wasn’t,” he said, again so reasonable. Nathaniel had taken the new power level between the three of us in stride a lot more than I had, or even Damian had.
“I have never seen your eyes blaze with Jean-Claude’s blue when he wakes for the day,” Rafael said.
“He has more control over it,” I said.
Nathaniel said, “It’s not just that, some of the Harlequin’s eyes change when their masters wake and they have control.”
“It’s a shorthand for them to know everything that’s happened during the day while they slept. We can just tell Jean-Claude or Damian.”
“Why does it bother you so much when it happens?” Nathaniel asked. His eyes were fading from the deep violet of happiness toward the normal lavender.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you know everything that your moitié bêtes know?” Benito asked.
“No,” I said.
“But you could read their thoughts if you wanted to,” he said.
I thought about it and then nodded. “But it’s more sharing memories than thoughts.”
“Perhaps I have not understood all the possibilities of our king becoming your moitié bête, Anita,” Benito said.
“Unless you have a vampire who shares rat as their animal to call included in the mix, it won’t be as intimate as what Anita shares with Nathaniel and Damian,” Micah said.
“How do you know?” Rafael asked.
“I’ve talked to Jean-Claude at length about it.”
“But Damian is not a master vampire, so he has no animal to call,” Rafael said.
“One of them is the master vampire,” Micah said, motioning at Nathaniel and me.
“So, Anita,” Benito said.
“I’m not so sure,” Claudia said, and she was looking at Nathaniel as if she saw something in him she’d missed or hadn’t noticed before.
“If we take this step together, Anita, will our secrets be safe from one another?” Rafael asked.
“I won’t peek on purpose, but to say anything else is too close to a lie. The truth is, I’m not sure. What’s happening between Nathaniel and Damian and me is different than how it feels to be with Jean-Claude and Richard, so I just don’t know.”
“Richard hates being a werewolf too much to be a full third in your triumvirate,” Nathaniel said.
No one argued, and Rafael had been Richard’s friend and ally before he was mine. Rafael asked, “So you think that your comfort level with being a wereleopard is what makes the difference between the three of you?”
“Yeah, I know now that Richard’s conflicts cripple the power that Jean-Claude could have from their triumvirate, well, that and . . .” Nathaniel stopped in midsentence.
“He was about to say that Jean-Claude is too careful of Richard and me to bind us as powerfully as he could,” I said.
“You finished his thought?” Rafael asked.
“No, we’ve had the conversation before,” I said, not like I was entirely happy about it.
Rafael looked at all of us, including Micah, who was trying for a blank face. “What am I missing here?”
Surprisingly, it was Claudia who answered, “Nathaniel’s not conflicted about what he is and what he wants.”
We all looked at her. “I didn’t know you were paying that much attention to what I wanted,” Nathaniel said.
She looked uncomfortable, but said, “You almost picked a fight with Bobby Lee when you came into the power of your triumvirate. He told the other bodyguards so we wouldn’t underestimate you.”
Nathaniel looked embarrassed, which you didn’t see often. “I didn’t understand that power could be like drugs. It was like being high and I’m not good when I’m high, which is one of the reasons I got clean and stayed clean.”
“The powerless are sometimes only good because they are not strong enough to be evil,” Rafael said.
Nathaniel gave him startled eyes and then looked away and nodded. “The temptation was there, but Damian and Anita deserved better than me acting like an asshole.”
“But you’re the only one who isn’t conflicted about your supernatural powers, and . . . the sex,” Claudia said, like she wished she hadn’t had to say it. “I didn’t realize that it limited Jean-Claude’s power with Richard and Anita so much until you showed us all how much power could be gained without that hesitation.”
“Being nicer about it limits the power, too,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said, “but it still shows us what the other triumvirate could be.”
“I want the power of being your rat to call, Anita, and I am not conflicted about it.”
“Without a vampire in the mix to make this a three-way, metaphysically speaking, that’s not as important.”
“I am glad that Jean-Claude calls only wolves.”
“So am I, because I think you would have been far more willing to compromise in ways that Richard wasn’t,” Micah said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean if Jean-Claude had needed a rat instead of a wolf to call, well, Rafael just said it, he’s not conflicted about wanting power and being a wererat, so he would be closer to how Nathaniel is with you and Damian.”
“More power,” I said.
“And no room in your life for othe
r people, maybe,” Micah said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Our king would not have allowed Jean-Claude more liberties than the Ulfric allows him,” Benito said, and he was angry enough that his beast flitted along my skin, but standing this close to Nathaniel, it didn’t bother me like it had before.
“Hush, Benito, there is no shame in loving who you love,” Rafael said.
Benito seemed to realize that he’d just insulted several people in the hallway by implying that guy-on-guy sex was shameful, because he tried to fix it. “I did not mean . . . what the Nimir-raj does is his own business and Nathaniel is Nathaniel. I just meant that . . . I . . .”
Claudia fought to turn her laugh into a cough.
“For the kind of power that Jean-Claude has now, I might have done many things years ago.”
I think Rafael had just admitted he’d been willing to have sex with Jean-Claude to cement a triumvirate with me and him. I think I was surprised, and then I remembered something that Richard had told us years ago.
“Richard said you were the one who urged him to come back to Jean-Claude and me once, that if you could have offered yourself in his place to keep us all safe, you would have done it.”
“Richard has thrown away more power than most of us in the supernatural community are ever offered,” Rafael said.
“You wouldn’t have thrown it away,” Micah said.
Rafael looked at him, and they had a long moment of understanding between them. I wasn’t sure exactly what they were understanding, but I knew that was what they were doing.
“Through Anita I now have a chance for some of that power.”
“You started to gain power when Anita started feeding on all of the wererats through you,” Micah said.
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